


Circle

by RuinsPlume



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anal Fisting, Anal Sex, Angst, Book 3: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Canon Compliant, Catharsis!sex, Community: rs_games, Dirty Talk, Light BDSM, M/M, Nipple Play, Oral Sex, R/S Games 2016, Rimming, Romance, Sex Magic, Smut, implied PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-17
Updated: 2016-10-17
Packaged: 2018-08-22 19:45:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8298139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RuinsPlume/pseuds/RuinsPlume
Summary: R/S Games 2016 - Day 11 - Team TimeAfter almost thirteen years apart, their brief reunion in the Shrieking Shack was not nearly enough.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to my fabulous beta, Brighty18. Written for the 2016 R/S Games. My prompt was a quote from Sophocles: "Hide nothing, for time, which sees all and hears all, exposes all."

  


_“...Headmaster, there is no need to see me to the gates, I can manage...”_  
_Harry had the impression that Lupin wanted to leave as quickly as possible._  
— _Prisoner of Azkaban_  
  


Remus stands on the stretch of road just past Hogsmeade, his face expressionless. Although he is fairly sure he is not being watched, if anyone _is_ watching it should not appear that Professor Lupin—or rather, _ex_ -Professor Lupin—is doing anything other than taking an evening stroll.

 _Slowly_ , he thinks. _Go slowly_.

Not running, then, and not screaming out the name that is making his exhausted body nearly shake in anticipation that he might—no, he will not think about that, he will not think anything. Without even so much as glancing toward the Shack, Remus shoves his trembling hands deep in his pockets and steps off the road into the ditch, threading his way through dandelions and a few poppies. When he reaches the stile in the fence, he slips through. The heat of the day still rises from the meadow, a light wind blowing the smell of the grasses up around him, tall and sweet and going to seed. Keeping close to the fence, Remus begins walking the perimeter of the field. He is grateful for the breeze: he wants his scent carried in every direction, just in case. 

_Won’t work_ , says his rational mind—or what’s left of it. _He’s gone_. But Remus keeps walking, because last night his rational mind suffered a severe breach of its heavily fortified walls. And now waves of feeling are breaking over him too fast to catalogue. Did Sirius feel this way when he first escaped? This dizzying sense of—what is it?—panic, really, at the widening circles of possibility, of feeling things again? The Sirius he once knew thrived on such unfolding freedoms, but Remus feels too fragile for the vulnerability he is willfully, foolishly, insanely walking into. His exhausted mind and body are the shoddiest of bulwarks against more pain. 

Last night the wolf would have killed three children, killed _Harry_ , jaws breaking into flesh, tearing through muscle, crunching bone. Remus shudders and walks faster, as if he might outpace the bloody images rising in his mind. _But then Padfoot was there_. Really there. Not in a dream. It doesn’t seem real, not yet. Although Remus has grown skilled—frighteningly skilled, he sometimes admits—at keeping his memories contained when he’s awake, he has never been able to control his dreams, and he has never stopped dreaming of Padfoot. Padfoot beside him, Padfoot nuzzling his neck, Padfoot sprawled on top of him, and the weight of the dog body so tangible, so heavy and exact, that in his dreams Remus would think _It must be true, he must be here_. Padfoot licking his face, loving his face, and the sensation of that long moist tongue, the damp trail of heat so viscerally present that it had to be real. But then he’d wake and find that the dog’s kisses were simply dream translations of his own sleep-cried tears. 

Now it seems obvious that he should have known the truth about Sirius because of Padfoot: incapable of disloyalty or betrayal. Perhaps that was what the Padfoot dreams had been trying to tell him for years, but he never understood them, he never tried to probe them. He only woke crying and tried to forget. A fresh wave of guilt prickles through him, so strong it makes him shudder. _Stop thinking_ , he thinks violently, walking even faster. _And slow down_. It is a measure of his exhaustion and near-panic that he is having so much trouble controlling himself. He had planned to wait until dark to cross to the Shack, but here he is walking straight through the meadow, knee deep in the damp grasses. So be it. He raises his head and looks directly at the Shack for the first time. Of course he sees no one, neither human nor animal. 

When he reaches the west wall of the Shack, the one you can’t see from any point on the road, he sits down to wait. The breeze shifts, and Remus’s nose, still sensitive from transformation, registers cow parsley and clover, gorse from the hills beyond. And blood scents: mice and voles and rabbits. But no sign of dog. How long, then, is he going to sit here like a fool? Until midnight? Until morning? Remus shoves the question aside and tries to anchor himself in his surroundings. The stone foundation at his back, the packed earth beneath him. The damp smell of evening settling over the field, bedding it down. The sharp tang of his own human skin: beneath the soap and cotton, he smells the wilt of his fatigue, mumble of tamped-down panic, heat of shame over last night’s transformation, and the salty edges of sweat laced with the strain of holding back.... 

Mercifully, he dozes. And then he is toppling sideways in the grass, his shoulders pinned beneath huge paws, hot breath and slobber in his nose. He is dreaming: Padfoot is licking him. Remus is crying in his sleep and Padfoot is licking him. And then Remus is awake and the dog kisses continue in the darkness, slurping at his eyes, his cheeks, his nose. 

_“You came,”_ he chokes, struggling to hold the rippling body before it disappears again. “Padfoot, you came.” 

He buries his head in the thick black hair of Padfoot’s neck and throws his arms around the dog’s back. 

_Padfoot_. He is awake, it is real. And then: “Sirius. We can’t stay here.” Remus grips a handful of the loose skin at the back of the dog’s neck and hauls him off. Beneath all that hair, the nearness of the skeleton comes as a shock: bones right against his knuckles. “I’m afraid you’ll splinch if you’re a dog,” he says. “Change back now, and hold on.”   

The black body shakes out, rises on two legs. Muzzle becomes blur of sunken face and eyes, paws shift to bony hands as Sirius hooks his arm through Remus’s and Remus sweeps his wand. They turn together, pulled together into the sickening flux of Apparition, and then reform. 

Two bodies, standing upright, clutching each other in the dark. Remus’s arms are shaking, his stomach looping. Sirius pants shallowly, still shifting back. He smells different, Remus notices. Not the scents Remus remembers—skin scent full of lake water and smoke, hair smell full of wind. This Sirius smells—thinner. And cold. His skin is giving off a cold smell that makes  
Remus feel cold too. 

_“Lumos,”_ he murmurs, and steps back so they can see each other. 

The prison rags of last night and the mane of filthy hair are gone. Sirius’s hair is clean and pushed behind his ears, and even in the dim wandlight Remus can see strands of silver shining in the black. His face in the shadows is oddly masklike, all hollows and sharp bones. He looks even older than Remus does now. 

Remus moves to touch Sirius’s cheek, then stops himself. Should he presume? He changes the gesture into flicking his wand at the kerosene lamp on the writing desk. Sirius turns toward the light, away from Remus, eyes darting around the room. 

Remus follows his gaze: a shabby summer cottage with unpainted wooden walls, one of which is entirely occupied by bookshelves. Sirius’s eyes roam over the desk, crowded with rolls of parchment and an old record player. He glances at the iron daybed with its lumpy bolsters, then takes a few steps to peer into the kitchen alcove: pump sink, small wooden table, a single wooden stool. 

"This is your place,” he says finally. 

“Yes. It belonged to my mum’s aunt.” 

“It must be cold in winter.” 

“It is.” 

Sirius is wearing clothes that are clean but too large for him. They look oddly familiar, though Remus can’t think why. He watches as Sirius steps just inside the kitchen and begins fiddling with the items on the tiny table, picking up box of tea bags, rifling through a stack of student parchments, touching the chipped porcelain handle of Remus’s teapot. 

“Tea?” Remus asks. 

Sirius ignores him. He turns his attention back to the main room and examines a shelf of books, running his fingers across an entire row, back and forth, back and forth. Remus represses the urge to tell him to stop. He says nothing as Sirius fidgets around the room, touching everything. He acts like someone coming down off muggle uppers, Remus thinks, and wonders if there was anything in Azkaban to dull the pain of Azkaban, and doesn’t ask. 

“That record player,” Sirius says. “I’ve seen it somewhere before.” 

“It belonged to James—it was his father’s. Oh, Sirius, I—” 

“Don’t,” Sirius says, holding up both hands to ward off the emotion Remus feels welling up inside him. “Don’t. I can’t, Remus. Don’t ask me to.” He turns away and begins stalking the cottage again, examining the rust on the daybed’s wrought iron back, the frayed seam of one of the bolsters.   

For the last twenty-four hours, Remus realizes, some secret undisciplined part of his mind has been surreptitiously feeding on fantasies of tender kisses, of melting together into some unspecified and luxurious bed. What bed would that be? Not this one, with its ratty single mattress and threadbare slipcover. 

_You fool_ , he thinks, and then, hard on the heels of that thought: _I want Padfoot_. But he will not ask Sirius for that. Remus steels himself again, a spell he doesn’t even notice anymore, wandless and wordless and perfected. It marks out a structure inside him, hollow and cool, like scaffolding. A structure that means nothing in itself, but that enables him to work and not fall. Clinging to his scaffolding, Remus tries to think of something safe to say. 

“How did you get...cleaned up?” 

Sirius looks up and smiles for the first time. It is not the smile Remus remembers, but a very distant cousin, a wry, reflective one. 

“Dumbledore did it. They’d locked me up in Flitwick’s office, he and Fudge. I was trying to explain about Peter, telling them to wait until you’d changed back, to ask you, to ask Harry and his friends, that they’d vouch for me. But Fudge wasn’t having any of it. He locked me in and I thought—” Sirius breaks off, turning away to hide his face. “I thought that was the end. Then Dumbledore came back. To stay with me, I thought, while the dementors did it, but then—he told me believed me.” Sirius takes a breath, steadies himself in the kitchen doorway. “I told Dumbledore everything then. About us being animagi, and about my making Peter the—Remus, if I’d just trusted you—” 

Sirius jerks back suddenly and slams both hands against the wall. The windows rattle. Remus jumps. 

“I killed them, Remus, that’s what it comes down to. I can’t get past it.” 

“Voldemort killed them,” Remus says steadily. “After _Peter_ betrayed them.” 

“ _Don’t_.” Sirius strikes the wall again. “I can’t even—oh, God, what was I saying? I was saying something else, something good—” 

“Dumbledore.” 

“Yes.” He presses his fist against his mouth, thinking. “Dumbledore.” He straightens up, bracing himself in the doorway. “He said there was a plan, and that he had to leave for it to work. But before he left, he—he cleaned me.” Sirius touches his hair. “He put his hands on top of my head, and ran them down over my hair, and…Scourgified it, I guess, but he didn’t do it with his wand. Then he ran his hands over my arms, and down the sides of my legs, all the way down to my feet. And when he stood up again, I was clean. And in these clothes.” 

Remus looks at Sirius’s shirt and trousers and realizes why they seem familiar. “Sirius,” he says, repressing the sudden urge to giggle, “those clothes are mine. I wondered where they’d gone when I was packing. And those boots—” he sways, feeling a little hysterical now— “I’m sure they’re Dumbledore’s.” 

Sirius looks down at the black ankle boots. “That’s why they’re too big, then.” He shakes his head. “Fucking brilliant. He fixed my mouth, too. Look.” And he comes toward Remus at last, his lips parted, and Remus remembers dimly that the Sirius of last night had broken teeth. 

“Your mouth looks like it always did,” Remus says softly. He puts his hand up to Sirius’s cheek. His skin. Sirius’s hand comes up too, finds Remus’s and holds it. Rough fingers, dry, hardened. Their hands, holding each other again. Remus leans in to kiss him, but Sirius suddenly whirls away. He goes to the window and pulls aside the curtain, looking out into the darkness. 

All right, Remus tells himself. No kissing. No kissing now, or no kissing ever? _I want Padfoot_ , he thinks again. That is all he wants. Just that much. Just Padfoot in his arms. He feels like a child caught in a slipstream of adult emotion too complex for him to name. 

_Just Padfoot. That’s all._

Sirius begins fidgeting with the kerosene lamp, adjusting the wick, which does not need adjusting. Remus tries a direct approach. 

“Sirius. Please stop fiddling with things and come sit down.” 

But Sirius ignores this. “I’m a bit mad now, Remus,” he says, turning the flame higher. “I mean even more now than before, yeah? I feel things and they’re all jumbled up. Maybe because I spent too much time as Padfoot, I don’t know, but it’s like there’s a Muggle bomb inside me, ticking, waiting to go off, and if I make the wrong move it _will_ go off, and I’ll just fly apart. I mean…I wanted to see you, I thought maybe if we…but it’s worse here, I’m sorry. Now that I’m here with you, I can see myself more clearly, I’m seeing me the way I think _you’re_ seeing me, and everything inside me is a sodding mess, and it will be a worse mess if I explode, that’s what I feel like, like I’m going to explode, and I don’t—I don’t _know_ ,” he finishes helplessly. 

“Well, of course,” Remus says in what he hopes is his calmest voice. “You’ve been in Azkaban for twelve years. Of course you’d feel—” 

“Don’t be fucking _reasonable_ about it!” Sirius cries. “There’s nothing reasonable about that place! Don’t talk to me like you’re a professor, it’s fucking _patronizing_ , is what it is—auugh—” Sirius shakes himself all over and then the anger is gone as suddenly as it came. “I’m sorry, Remus,” he says, fingers drumming against his thighs, “I just don’t—I don’t know how to _be_.” He looks around, agitated again, and moves back to the bookcase, running his hands across the spines of the books again. Remus watches in silence as Sirius mangles some of the more fragile paperbacks, bits of their covers flaking off beneath his nails. His whole body is wound taut with a pain that Remus can feel in his own body as well, like something contagious. And this manic jittery dance Sirius is doing is making it worse. 

Remus appeals to the dog. 

“ _Padfoot_. If you don’t stop chewing the furniture, I’m tying you up.” 

Sirius turns his head, fingers suddenly still. He looks hard at Remus, eyes sharp with an expression Remus doesn’t know. Remus feels a lurch of fear inside his chest. 

“Right, then,” says Sirius. “Tie me.” 

And there it is. Remus had meant it as a joke; not literally, and certainly not now. Not like this. But there it is. Remus feels the flood of instinct swell inside him, knowledge that needs no further evidence. It is the kind of mind-reading they once did with each other all the time. More primitive than legilimency; less nuanced, but also truer, impossible to distort with interpretation. Instinct only tells what _is _, not what it means.__

It tells what’s needed. And what’s needed is this. Good Lord. 

“Bring a chair,” Remus says, stalling for time. He needs his thinking mind to catch up to what his instinct has told him must now happen. 

Sirius turns with an agility Remus has not yet seen, and picks up the wooden stool in the kitchen. He places it in the center of the sitting room, between Remus and the daybed. Remus squares his shoulders. Can he do this? His body still aches from transformation and his nerves are shredded. The hollow thinking space he’s made inside himself is full of fractures; he can barely hold back his need for closeness, for tenderness; the effort of trying is threatening to overwhelm him with exhaustion. He is in no condition to do what Sirius is asking. 

But he will. He knows he will because he has already started. 

“Take off those clothes,” he commands. 

Sirius does, fingers trembling as he fumbles the buttons on his shirt, then kicks his way out of his boots and trousers. He is so thin it makes Remus’s throat ache. 

“Now sit.” 

Sirius hunches naked on the stool, eyes on the floor. Remus grips his wand, prepared to bind him with a spell, but hears himself speaking other words instead. 

“Unbuckle my belt.” 

Much better: the belt carries the charge of his own body; its removal, the charge of Sirius’s submission. Some reserve of energy Remus did not know he still had is beginning to prickle through him. He steps closer to the stool and Sirius tugs the frayed black leather from the buckle, not looking at Remus, intent on his job. 

“Hands behind you.” 

They’re both already hard, but other than that Remus is not sure what he’s feeling. He knows what to _do_ —with the sharpest edge of instinct he knows it—but what he _feels_ about it is something else, something complicated and involving words he can’t think of right now because he has to focus. Remus circles around behind Sirius, looping the belt around Sirius’s wasted wrists at the small of his back, snugging the buckle’s tooth into the smallest hole. 

Sirius, so thin and naked, throws his shoulders back and juts his chin out, but when Remus stands in front of him again, he drops his eyes. 

“Look at me,” Remus orders. 

Sirius does. The effect of their eyes locking is immediate and electric, as if they’ve both been shocked. Remus’s whole body goes hard, not just his cock now; it’s his arms, the muscles in his legs, his mouth, his jaw. The feeling is akin to the beginnings of transformation, the rising in his body of something both alien and owned, a power he is not easy with. He looks down at Sirius, whom he knows has felt it too, and out of the shadows of his face, Remus sees a flash of the boy for whom the energy of life and the energy of sex were still the same thing. 

He holds himself steady over Sirius, breathes. They both want Remus to hurry up and start touching, but it’s Remus’s job to go slow. He knows that. His job right now is to do what he’s always excelled at, better than anyone. To maintain control. 

He takes Sirius’s sunken cheeks between his thumb and forefinger, forcing his head back just a little. 

“You want me?” Remus asks. 

“You know I do,” Sirius says, in a voice so stripped by longing that Remus does know it, with all of himself, in a way he hadn’t until now. 

“Do you trust me?” 

Sirius’s shadowed eyes fill with tears. “Forever, Moony.” 

Remus nearly gives up then. He wants to throw himself against Sirius’s chest and weep, to stop the scene and untie Sirius and be held while they both cry. He wants to be the one who’s comforted, because the time they didn’t trust each other has filled the room with the ghosts of two beautiful children dead, and it’s too much, he can’t do this, not now. 

But he does. For Sirius he can. Remus closes his eyes and calls on the wolf inside him in a way he never allows. He calls up the blood through his bitten body until his eyes burn hot and feral and he stares down at Sirius to teach him his position: Remus is in charge here. He stares, unblinking, a low growl rising in his throat. Sirius whimpers and tips his head back, exposing his throat. The Pack gesture of submission. And then Remus begins to feel his dominance in earnest; it’s altering the pheromones in the air between them, enveloping them both. 

“I’m going to fuck you,” Remus growls. 

“Yes.” A dog’s whine, eyes away. 

“But you’ll beg first." 

Sirius shivers once. “Please.” Still not looking at him. 

Remus waits. 

Sirius raises his head, eyes somewhere around Remus’s collar bone. 

“Please, Remus.” 

Remus looks at his nails, picks a stray thread from his shirt sleeve. The Sirius that Remus remembers, has never stopped remembering, is capable of better. It is Remus’s job now to find that person and call him up out of the wreck of this man trembling before him. 

“I want you to. Need you to.” Sirius looks up at him briefly, then cuts his eyes away again. Under his breath: “Fuck. Please.” 

Remus glances toward the kitchen and pretends to think he’d like a cup of tea. Professor Lupin will take his tea with one sugar, thank you, and he’ll take his supplication with eloquence and filth or not at all. None of this limp warmed-over shit. He starts to turn away. 

“NO,” Sirius howls, “DON’T LEAVE.” He thrusts his face up toward Remus, his eyes locked on Remus’s now. “I’m begging, all right? _Merlin_ —fuck me over the kitchen table if that’s what you want, or on my back on this stupid couch thing, or up against your flimsy wall, but get to it, for God’s sake, I need you to spread me open and make me wet and ram your cock into my arse and fuck me out of twelve years of horror, I want you to fuck me till I can’t remember my nightmares or what I’ve done, who I’ve killed or what my name is, fuck me till I break open and the pain I can’t live with any more comes raging out and you take my heart in your hands and lick it clean like I did for you so many times when you hurt yourself, Moony, do it now, please if you love me, give me my soul back, do anything you—” 

Remus clamps a hand across Sirius’s mouth. He can’t take any more, his heart is choking. Sirius’s lips are dry as paper against Remus’s palm. He shoves the heel of his hand in between Sirius’s teeth until Sirius bites him, gagging a little and breathing hard. 

Remus holds steady above him. After a moment Sirius nods. 

“You’re ready?” Remus asks. 

A throat sound whose tone is yes. 

Remus makes a quick calculation. Then, in one fluid motion, he surges forward, and as hard as he can, throws Sirius off the stool. 

Sirius flies backward with a yelp and lands hard on his back on the daybed, his bound hands beneath him. 

It hurt, landing like that, Remus thinks distantly as he kicks the stool away and stands over him, his whole body inflamed. Sirius’s eyes are dilated, glazed with shock. He makes a noise, not speech, already partway to an animal place—the site where the deepest wounds are inflicted, and where they might be healed again. Remus is amazed at his own skill; after so long, he has still intuited correctly: Sirius still thrives on adrenaline. It seems, perversely, to help him focus. And this calms him down. 

Remus yanks off his shirt, kicks out of trousers and pants. He kneels on the couch, pushing Sirius’s thighs back toward his shoulders. Sirius tied, his dilated eyes on Remus, and his cock, oh God, the head pushing up through the foreskin, hard for him, the glistening slit—the wolf wants all of him and Remus is going to lose it right now, _NO_ not yet— 

He forces himself to breathe above the wave of hunger pouring through him until he can make his mind focus again. Sirius’s eyes are on him and Remus keeps the gaze, barely blinking, concentrating all of himself through his eyes so Sirius can see that he is here and will not leave him. That Remus will take him with absolute care to wherever he must go, and stay there with him, and then bring him back whole. 

“I have you,” Remus whispers. “You’re safe.” 

Sirius makes another sound in his throat, a Padfoot whine of longing, and then Remus on his knees bends low and brings his lips down, down, holds them a breath away from the tip of that cock. After almost thirteen years. This man. Remus breathes in deep gulps of the scent of him, and past the new cold smell there is another set of smells that Remus remembers. Earthy like the forest floor, and piney like the forest; and a bit doggy, like lake water; and leather even when he wasn’t wearing any, and another smell that is just Sirius’s skin, and Sirius is moaning above him and Remus hasn’t even touched him yet. He lets his tongue slip from between his lips to close the hair’s distance between them, just to tongue, just to barely tongue the sheath. But when he does, when that skin is against his tongue, his lips, Remus can’t wait any longer and takes the whole head of Sirius’s cock in his mouth and holds him, tasting the whole of a lost world. This skin. This scent. This man. To have him in his mouth again, oh God. 

He could stay right here, tasting and sucking, but a moan high above him brings him back. There is more to explore here, and Remus has promises to keep. He holds Sirius a moment longer, tastes and licks just a moment more, then slides down, breathing in the dark hair nesting Sirius’s balls, pausing there too to bury his nose. And then, and then: Remus spreads Sirius’s arse cheeks gently apart. The puckered shadow unfolds like a fistful of dusky petals. Impossible flower, suddenly blossomed. Remus breathes in and is almost lost in scent, in sensation. Inside the petals, deep sweetness. He begins to feel glazed, a heaviness in his limbs. Remus drags his head up just long enough to summon lube and whisper a protecting spell. Then tongues and presses, and then his finger. His finger in a flower, in and in.

_Like that, like that, oh Moony be inside me._

This road, this same road. To be here again. The room recedes, the world becoming body and embodiment. Remus fucks in a finger, cups Sirius’s balls, takes the sac inside his mouth. The heaviness on his tongue, the taste of Sirius’s secret skin. He is drowning in pleasure. A second finger, hot and tight and perfect, deep inside the only place he wants to be.

“More,” Sirius whimpers above him.

Remus breathes against his arsehole, strokes the sweet folds with his tongue. Nestles a third finger in. Sirius rocks his thighs back, struggling to spread wider, and Remus hears Sirius’s voice in his head a moment before the words are spoken aloud.  

“Your cock now, _hard_.”

A growl escapes Remus’s lips and his body vibrates like a struck bell. Wolf tones rippling through him. He grips Sirius by the hips, waves of energy raking his body wild and deep and low. The wolf wants to bite him, Remus wants to come inside him, and Sirius is so stretched, and Remus so ready he is leaking. He slides right in. Sirius moans and Remus almost comes right then, in the deep heat of Sirius’s body tight around his cock, because _this_ is what both of them were meant for.

A faraway voice in his mind warns him to be gentle, but Sirius is growling beneath him, and the rumble of it is working into him, the growl rising in his own voice and spilling out of him as he lets himself go, fucking in hard, their bodies deep inside a wave of something shifting back and forth between them, something that is Pack, is _home_ , and it makes Remus go dominant again.

“Look at me, Padfoot.” 

The gaze brings the energy even higher, vibrating around them, pulling them even deeper into each other. They are together. All the way together now. “Mine,” Remus snarls, whipping his hips. Eyes locked together, bodies locked together, Sirius snarls back, then whimpers. Remus feels the waves of it pass through him, a dark exalted sweetness that is locking them together, unlocking something wild inside him as he falls against Sirius, biting at his neck, biting his chest, biting and fucking and taking.

“Moony—” 

“ _Mine_ —” Remus growls, his teeth against Sirius’s sweet sweat-salty neck. He is fucking his way toward orgasm now, riding the crest of it.

“You—we—in my body—I’m—” The breath is knocked out of Sirius with each of Remus’s thrusts, he’s in so deep.

“Gonna come in your arse—” 

“— _yours_ —”

The words are whirled away as Remus lets go, spilling into him, both of them roaring together, their chests pressed slick together, his mouth finding Sirius’s mouth, his lower lip. Remus bites again, holding him between his teeth as his orgasm goes on and on between them. Remus bites and owns, Sirius gripping him and bucking into it until Remus finishes and collapses on top of him.

The bite eases to a suckle as Remus feels himself regain himself. Sirius is still hard between their bellies, and now Remus slides his hand between them, circles the length of his cock and strokes. He is only Remus now, no wolf. 

“I’m sorry,” he says in Sirius’s ear. “The wolf was...extremely glad to see you.”

“Don’t apologize. I loved it.”

Remus thumbs the foreskin just below the glans, making Sirius shiver beneath him. “Do I bring you off in my mouth now? Do you fuck my fist like this, between us? Tell me.”

“I want—” Sirius’s cock twitches in Remus’s hand, grows even harder. “I want—oh, fuck. Oh, Moony.” He buries his face in Remus’s neck. If it were anyone else, Remus would think the movement was one of shame. 

“Padfoot, what? Tell me.”

Sirius hesitates. And in the hesitation, with his breath against Remus’s throat, Remus hears the answer anyway, directly inside his head, a moment before Sirius actually says it. Then he says it.

“Your whole hand.”

Remus never has. They did everything else back then, when their young bodies were so impossibly whole. They didn’t know it; they’d thought they were broken already. They had no idea, none. And they thought they’d done everything, fumbling and awkward at first, then later with such skill it was sometimes frightening. They’d played and clowned and dared. They’d jerked off where they might get caught, they’d tied each other up with scarves and charms, they’d tried blindfolds, they’d pissed on each other in the showers. They’d fucked and sucked and flipped each other in bedrooms and bathrooms, in empty classrooms and the Shrieking Shack. They’d done it when they were happy and when they were miserable, when they were drunk and when they were exhausted, when they were elated and when they were scared. They did it once on the Quidditch Pitch, and once at James’s parents’ house in his parents’ bed, and once in McGonagall’s office. On top of the astronomy tower at least a dozen times, and in a hotel room in Edinburgh and two other hotels in London. In every room of Sirius’s flat. Sometimes soft and sweet and endless, sometimes slamming and fast. Through all the fear and mistrust and other people dying in the war they still did it, and then came the murders and Sirius was gone. 

Remus takes a deep breath. “Should I untie you first?”

Sirius shakes his head no, face still hidden. “Keep me bound. It helps me be more...here.”

Remus slides a bolster behind Sirius’s head, propping him up so he can see his face. He’s heard other men talk about this, and he’s read enough about it, and he’s even seen it once, at a private Muggle club in London. And now here he is, kneeling between the knees of a man who trusts him enough to ask him to do this. Sirius. Sirius trusts him that much.

Sirius keeps his eyes closed as Remus begins fingering him, stroking in through his own come, breathing in the smell of himself mingled with the smell of Sirius, a musk his wolf nose could sit here all night smelling, the smell of Pack together. And now together like this: Remus takes a deep breath and whispers a spell he’s never said before. His heart is pounding and all of this is new. The deep almost-purple of Sirius’s hole, the way it lightens around his fingers as he fucks in slowly. The heaviness of Sirius’s bollocks, dark and ripe as plums. Three fingers. Then four. Remus smells and tastes and wonders into silence, until the only sounds are breath and the slip of lubrication, the slow push of flesh on flesh.

“All right, then?”

Sirius nods, his eyes squeezed shut in concentration. “Just...just _more_.”  

He is trembling, holding back the urge to push down over Remus, an urge winding so tightly inside him it makes his hips and shoulders jerk, half-hard cock twitching against his belly. Remus flattens his fingers, tucks his thumb against his shining, half-buried hand. Slowly, as if opening a door, he rotates in. Sirius moans, deep and far away. Remus turns his hand again. Knuckles. Slowly, gently, he pushes the door open. Sirius grinds down and whimpers—and then Remus is all the way in.

It is indescribable, the feeling. Remus is stunned with the wonder of it, the thunder of Sirius’s heartbeat pounding down over his whole hand.

“Like this?” he whispers. “Me inside of you like this?” 

Sirius voices something inarticulate and guttural, trembling around Remus’s hand. Then: “There’s...oh Merlin, there’s _everything_.” 

Remus feels it then, a pulse like the pulse of Sirius’ blood around him, his life flowing in through Remus’s hand inside him, the feelings of it pouring through him. It is Pack, the energy and scent and magic that means Pack, radiating through them. But then a wave of cold assaults Remus, gripping his hand. His nose fills with something that is wholly not-Sirius, not this, not blood or breath or joining, something horribly empty, an absence of scent, of love, of desire, of anything. Without meaning to, Remus jerks his arm. 

“No!” Sirius yelps. 

“I’m sorry!” Remus makes his fist go loose again. “Did I hurt you? Should I pull out?” 

“Not—not _you_. Just—touch, Moony, touch _more_.”

Remus slides his other hand around Sirius’s cock and feels the coldness ebb a little. He does not stroke—that would be too much, somehow, and it is so much just to hold Sirius both outside and inside, Remus’s two hands separated only by a bit of skin and a few thin layers of wasted muscle. He is taking Sirius apart, that’s what he’s doing, and Sirius is letting him, wants him to, take him apart and break him open, take Azkaban out from where it’s twisted up inside him.

“More—” 

A sob this time, and the deep sound of it it thrums up Remus’s arm. Remus wants more now, too, more joining, more breaking. He leans forward, and guides Sirius’s beautiful, shining cockhead between his lips. He holds Sirius in his mouth, the slit leaking over his tongue, oh God— 

"No!"

Remus stops at once and draws back, but Sirius shoves himself up into Remus’s mouth again. 

“Not you—don’t _stop_. Just— _hold_.” Sirius rakes in a sharp breath as Remus slides his mouth down the shaft. Then it comes again: “No. _No_.” 

This time Remus understands. The _no_ is not for him. Sirius has gone somewhere else, and it is Remus’s job to follow him there and somehow bring him back again. 

“ _No_ ,” Sirius cries while Remus holds him in his mouth and rocks him, fucks him with the very smallest rockings of the hand so deep inside him until Sirius breaks into a deep keening. “ _No no no no no no no no_ —” Each syllable so lost and ragged that all Remus can do is take Sirius’s cock all the way down to the root, as if he could suck the pain out of him that way. Cock swallowed in throat, hand swallowed in body. Deeper in and maybe they’ll both die here, sunk together in this circle of filled holes. And then Sirius’s huge and broken heart is in his hand and Sirius roars out a sound that begins in rage and ends in sobs as he comes, spilling into Remus’s mouth, clenching over Remus’s arm. Lost in sensation and grief, Remus swallows and swallows, his throat filling with a musk that tastes of concentrated tears. 

They are scarred and broken men on a sagging daybed in a tumbledown cottage in the middle of the night in early summer. Their bodies are streaked with tears, semen, and sweat, marked by thirteen years of scars and wards and bones and absence. But for a moment, for a few moments even, everything, even the world outside, seems to soften and exhale. 

Then Sirius pushes him out, and Remus sits back on his heels, jarred to find his hand is his again, his body a separate thing once more. He crawls up over Sirius and holds him.

“Are you—”  Remus begins, and then trails off again— _Are you all right_ has nothing much to do with this. “Are you here?” he asks instead. That’s a bit better. 

“I am spectacularly here.” 

A tone of voice Remus has not heard in thirteen years. He lifts his head and gazes into Sirius’s eyes. 

“Something’s changed,” Sirius says. “I feel—I don’t know how to say it.” 

“I felt Azkaban, I think. When I was inside you. I also felt _us_.” 

Sirius nods. “And right now everything inside me is...not quiet, exactly. But more in place.” 

“You _do_ feel that way after you’ve been well and truly fucked.” 

“It’s more than that. It’s like...I don’t know what it’s like. Remus, it’s like I’ve got my wand back." 

Remus cups Sirius’s softened cock, pets him. “This wand?” he asks, smiling. And then, as the words sink in: “Sirius. Your real wand. Where is it?” 

Sirius nuzzles his neck. “I hope it’s still locked up in the Ministry somewhere. Because I hope—I intend, actually—to steal it back.”

Sirius is much better at hoping than he is, Remus realizes. He ought to give Remus lessons.

“Moony? I think my hands, now.”

“Oh, God, I forgot. Let me untie you.” Remus sits up and then eases Sirius up by the shoulders, unbuckles the belt from his wrists. “They’re bruising. I’m sorry.” 

“Don’t ‘sorry’ me. You were fantastic. Do that to me another hundred times and I might calm down for good.” Sirius shakes his hands experimentally. “I can still feel them, anyway. Sort of.” He looks up at Remus. “How did you know? What to do, I mean.” 

“I just—” 

“Wait,” Sirius interrupts. “I’m sure you’ve fucked a lot of blokes in the ah— _interval_ since I last saw you. But I don’t want to hear about them yet.” 

Remus laughs, a rumble that is half-bitter. “You don’t have to. I knew what to do because I still feel it—what you want. That’s why I threw you. And my—my fist. I knew even before you told me.” 

Sirius nods. “Yes. I felt that. That you knew. You always do, yeah?” 

Remus takes one of Sirius’s hands between his own, massages it gently. “Right now what I know is to take care of you.” 

Sirius nods. Remus strokes the bruises, makes a bracelet of kisses around each wrist. He kisses each numb finger, sucks it until it’s warm and pink again. He lights a candle, brings a bowl of hot water and a flannel and sits on the edge of the bed and washes Sirius: his hands, his tear-streaked face. His belly, striped with dried come. His genitals.

“That feels wonderful, Moony.” 

“Much better than a cleaning charm.” Remus dips the flannel in the water, wrings it out. “Can I put this against your arse?” 

“Try it. Ow—no—yes. Keep it there. It’s good.” 

“You won’t be able to sit down for a week.” 

“I’ll just have to stay on my back then.” 

“Oh, Sirius. Stay here with me.” 

A ripple of pain crosses Sirius’s face. “You know the Ministry’s swarming everywhere. They could be here any minute, wards or no.” 

Remus feels cold. “Do you think they know about us?” 

“Maybe. Everyone screams in their sleep in Azkaban, at least at first. I don’t know what I said or didn’t say.” 

Remus lets the flannel drop back into the bowl. “I don’t think you said anything,” he says slowly, reasoning it out as he speaks. “You escaped nearly a year ago. I think they would have come to question me before this. So you’re safe here. You don’t have to go.” 

“Dumbledore’s just saved my life, and _he_ said to leave Britain—” 

“The hell with what he said,” says Remus, with a violence that surprises them both. “He doesn’t know what this is like. At least stay for tonight.” 

“If I say no, will you tie me to the bed?”

Remus looks down at him. “Truly, Sirius, do you have _any_ idea how exhausting you are?” 

“Yes,” says Sirius sadly. “I do.”

Remus washes his chest, his shoulders. “Where’s the hippogriff, then?”

“In a cave a mile or so from Hogsmeade. I’ll need to get him before sunrise.”  Sirius sits up suddenly. “Remus. When Harry flew up to that window, for a moment I thought it was…he’s just so much like James.” 

“I know,” Remus says, low. “When I first saw him, I--I’d been sleeping in our old compartment on the train. I couldn’t help it. And when I woke up, Harry was there, and—yeah. I was seeing James alive. And Sirius, Harry’s Patronus is a stag.” 

Sirius’s leg is jiggling once more, his fingers tapping on his thighs. Remus can see how much effort it is costing him not to break down again.

“A fully-fledged Patronus,” Sirius says, shoving his hands between his legs and squeezing hard to still himself. “James would have been so proud.”

“I know. And Harry is—he’s lovely. He’s like Lily, too. He has her kindness.”

“I meant James would have been proud of _you_ , Remus. James and I—we tried so hard to protect him, but—you. You’re the one who did.” 

And now it’s Remus who wants to say _Don’t_. Don’t let’s go any further down this road because if we do we will never find our way out again.

Sirius seems to realize this: he wipes his face and sits up a little, studying Remus.

Remus resumes rubbing dittany salve into the bruises on Sirius’s wrists, and then the marks on his neck and chest, blooming purple in the shape of Moony’s mouth. Then Remus salves the long scabs of his own transformation injuries. Sirius watches but does not comment, for which Remus is grateful. 

“I thought I might come back and find you married,” Sirius says after a while.

Remus looks up in surprise. “You don’t mean to a woman.”

“I meant settled down with some nice bloke.”

“Ah. No." 

Sirius tosses his head. “You haven’t moved on, then.” 

The words cut straight down his chest, down into his gut. He’s often said the same thing to himself, and just as harshly, but he did not expect this from Sirius. Though he should have—Sirius’s sudden cruelties are not new. 

“Moved on from you, you mean?” he asks sharply. “Is that what you’d rather?" 

“Don’t say it like that. I’ve been gone a long time, yeah?” 

“Yeah, you have, and I’ve been out here leading a bloody marvelous life, if you don’t count the years I spent wanting to die, and I’m still here only because I’ve spent every single day trying to push away everything I ever cared about, which is a constant wrestling match, which means I’ve spent every day of the last thirteen years locked in a fucking _embrace_ with everything I’ve tried to banish, so no, I haven’t ‘moved on,’ sorry to disappoint—” 

“ _Remus_.” Sirius’s voice is rough with anger. “Use your goddamn head. What do you think I’m asking? What did we just fucking _do_ together?”

“And if you want to know whether I’ve fucked a lot of blokes,” Remus surges on, “I have, more than I can count, and some women too, and I’ve _tried_ to move on” —he hears himself yelling now, but he can’t stop— “and if you must know, any time it starts to look like it might be good with someone, it always ends up shite, all right? Because all this time I’ve thought that if I’d been so wrong in loving you, I couldn’t ever trust myself to—to—" 

He breaks off. He will _not_ break down like this. He covers his face with his hands. 

After a while he feels Sirius’s fingers, touching his. 

“Remus.” 

Remus takes deep breaths and doesn’t answer. He has to find the structure in all this, the frame that will steady him. He is groping for it but something else is plucking back at him instead—Sirius’s fingers, trying to pry away his hands. 

“Moony, just look at me a minute.” 

Remus hides his hands under his arms, tucks his head down. 

_Think. Reason. Not lost. THINK._

Yes, there—a rubric. A methodology. Something to hold onto. 

“I always tell myself,” he says after a moment, eyes still closed, “that because I was happy once, I learned how to love better. Because when we were together at Hogwarts, I was as happy as anyone could ever expect to be in life, happier than I’d ever thought was possible. I tell myself that what I felt then still counts. Even though I’m too damaged to share it with a partner, it still counts, because it’s still a part of me. I do know how to love. I love a lot of people. And I love being around kids, and I loved teaching. And I always have books I love, and music. And somewhere around year eight or nine of you being gone, I learned to be content with that.” 

This is his scaffolding, the steel inside him. Cool and dependable. He feels his breathing even out. 

“Bullshit,” Sirius says. 

Remus looks up then. “It’s not bullshit. It’s true. I know it’s a compromise—I’m not stupid. But there wasn’t any other choice. And this way things are easier for me.” 

Sirius lets his tongue drift out of his mouth to lick the side of his own cheek. Padfoot comforting himself. Then he shakes his head, his whole body, and for a moment Remus thinks he’s going to shift. 

“No,” Sirius barks out, still human but wavering. He huffs, finding the words. “That’s _not_ it. You’re answering the wrong question. What I said about moving on? It came out wrong. I—Merlin’s tits, Remus, I just wanted to know where you stood, is all. Where I stand, I mean. With you.” 

Remus considers this. Calmly. When he speaks, he hears Professor Lupin’s voice, mild but exact. “So you were merely asking, in your own inimitable way, if I’m committed to somebody else?” 

“Something like that.” 

“Well, that’s easy. I’m not spoken for. Not now, and not ever, really. There’s never been anyone else I’ve truly felt— _serious_ about. There, now I’ve done the joke.” 

Sirius does not smile. “But?” he asks.

“But?"

“There’s a ‘but,’ coming. I can feel it.”

“I don’t know what—”

“Remus, I can see the fucking _gears_ whirling around inside your fucking _forehead_ , all right? So what is it? Godric, just tell me how you feel.” 

What a request, Remus thinks. After nearly thirteen years of trying very hard not to feel anything, what is he to say? He doesn’t know and can’t think; it’s too much, it has always been too much, things fighting inside him and he can’t control any of it, and he must control all of it, but that’s not a feeling, it’s a war. But he’s been in a war, a real one, and it’s not right to think _war_ for anything else, not even for this, this feeling that he’s falling, endlessly falling and there’s nothing to hold— 

And then Sirius does shift, pawing the daybed and dropping his shaggy head onto Remus’s lap. The dog’s dull claws scrape against his thighs as Padfoot nuzzles first his crotch and then his neck and face. Instinctively, Remus throws his arms around the dog, and they roll backward on the daybed, Padfoot on top of him, snuffling his hair, his chest, his ears. Remus holds on. He is being sniffed out, he knows; interrogated even, but it’s not as frightening with Padfoot as the investigator. Padfoot will not hurt him, ever. Remus sighs and lets the dog range over him.

Then Padfoot sits back on his haunches between Remus’s legs, his dark eyes mournful. Remus stares helplessly back. In some inarticulable way he knows he has failed; failed everything that ever mattered. Padfoot whimpers, then throws his head back and howls. 

The sound fills the little room and somewhere a boy is reaching for a dog across a whole skyful of night. 

But the boy is not here. And then the dog is not here either; above Remus, Padfoot ripples, shifts again, and then it’s Sirius gazing down into his eyes.

“You’re so afraid,” Sirius says, his voice soft with something like wonder. “And you hide it, even from me.” 

“You _left_ —” 

“ _Remus_.” Sirius runs his hand along Remus’s cheek and the touch is infinitely gentle. “Just let me look at you a minute, okay? I can _see_ now.” 

Sirius strokes his cheek again, then holds Remus’s face in both his hands, firm enough so he can’t move, but still soothing. Remus tries to keep the gaze and not die under it, not shrink and vanish, as Sirius begins talking, low under his breath.

“What I said before, that something changed. That I felt like I’d got my wand back. When you were—inside me. It wasn’t just the fucking, which was brilliant, Moony, but it’s more than that. Some other kind of magic came back in. I’d forgotten it in Azkaban. But I remember now. It’s like everything is vibrating the right way inside me, and I can see.” 

He pauses, licks his lips and frowns. “But I don’t understand this part: it’s not in you, Remus. Even Padfoot can’t find it. It’s like—like you’re all split up in pieces.”

“Given that I’ve spent my entire _life_ in pieces—” 

“Remus, I’m not—just let me do this, all right? Just—right. I’ll say it differently.” Sirius shifts one hand to Remus’s forehead, smooths back the tumbled hair. “Just listen to me for a minute, yeah?”

Remus nods, and Sirius lightly cups his face again. “Your eyes, now, Moony. They’ve always been so many colors. Like the forest in the autumn, when all the green goes that wild burnt orange in the dusk, and then in the mornings it’s all gold. Your eyes were always gold, too, just there at the center, like there was sunlight flaring from behind your pupils. But now it’s like an eclipse, with almost all the sunlight blocked. Not so gold anymore. And I could look at your eyes forever just as they are, you know I could, but there’s more, and you won’t let it out. And it’s killing you, isn’t it?” His fingers tighten suddenly on Remus’s jaw. “Tonight you gave the wolf a little slack, but that was because _I_ needed it. And it was brilliant, you were healing me. But you need it, too—you need _all_ of you, to have your magic the way we used to have it, and—you’re dying, Remus. You’re dying without it, Padfoot can smell it.” 

Sirius’s eyes are so intense they’re almost burning. Sirius is never truly still, but the intensity of this gaze creates a lock that is its own kind of stillness. It is a gaze made of the magic that Sirius is feeling, so strong in him now that his gaze pins Remus inside it, foreclosing everything else until there is no sound, no other movement but what the gaze contains.

What it contains right now is Remus shaking. 

And Remus can’t help it when he closes his eyes and tries to draw himself inward, away from Sirius piercing him. There are too many people in the room all of a sudden: someone who answers to Remus but isn’t really, and Professor Lupin, and the wolf, and a boy (small boy, terrified boy) that Remus doesn’t know, and Sirius can see them all. All of Remus is being looked at, and he doesn’t want it, he doesn’t like it, not even from Sirius, not after so much time apart, it’s too naked.

“You need it back,” Sirius whispers. “Will you let me? So you won’t be so afraid.”

But Remus never lets anyone, not anymore. He doesn’t even let himself. 

Sirius floats his fingers across Remus’s cheek, soothing him but not letting him turn away his head. 

“I want that so much for you. That magic. I want everything for you. Please, Moony.”

Remus swallows. A longing so enormous he can’t move. He closes his eyes. Sirius can be wrong about so much, but he is almost always right about Remus. Eyes shut tight, Remus feels his head nod. 

Sirius slides a hand down Remus’s shoulder, down to the center of his chest. He holds it there and a breath Remus did not realize he was keeping is exhaled. Then Sirius moves his hands again. Two sets of fingers come to rest lightly atop Remus’s nipples.

Two tiny sparks, _there_. Remus’s whole body tightens, but his chest opens up and out, rising toward Sirius’s fingers. 

Sirius thumbs the budding sparks, then twists. Another breath escapes Remus’s lungs like some long-captured bird.

“You still like this?” Sirius’s voice so soft, but burning with the energy of what he’s doing.  

“Yes,” Remus whispers.

“Then open your eyes.”

Sirius is smiling at him now, with the slow blaze Remus remembers, a sunburst that begins in Sirius’s eyes and pours down through his cheeks, widening his mouth, pouring over Remus, pouring through him, and ending somewhere deep in the root of his cock. Then Sirius wraps both arms around him and squeezes until Remus gasps for breath, a breath cut short by Sirius kissing him, exhaling his own breath into Remus’s mouth, into his lungs. Sirius breathes into him and holds him, nips his lips and holds him. Then works his hands between them and finds the erect nipples again. Remus whimpers in the back of his throat. Sirius fingers and fondles and tweaks until Remus is making one long sound, Sirius working the invisible line that runs from Remus’s nipples to his cock, a gold line wound tight as an instrument’s string.

Sirius plucks the string and Remus sings, a quivering moan that vibrates in the energy of Sirius playing the song of him with such attention and care that Remus is breaking up like an iceberg, like sticks in a bonfire. Any last strands of control he’s managed to retain are coming undone.

Then Sirius takes away his hands. 

Remus cries for them back.

“Mmmmm.” Sirius looks down at him, his eyes alight with love. “Yes, Moony. Everything for you.” 

But he doesn’t touch him. 

“Please play with me,” Remus husks. 

Sirius waits, letting Remus fall apart a little more. 

“Please—” 

“Patience. I’m getting you ready.” Sirius fingers both nipples hard and Remus cries out in pained arousal. “It’s almost time for me to suck your cock.” 

“Oh yes _please_ now—” 

Sirius scoots himself lower, licking his way down Remus’s chest, down the line of fine hairs on his abdomen which prickle and rise beneath his tongue. Sirius nips the insides of his thighs and Remus’s head thrusts back into the daybed cushions, hips arching up toward the teasing mouth. 

Sirius throws one arm across Remus’s hips, pressing down hard to keep him from thrusting. “Patience,” he says again, fingering a nipple. 

Remus moans, bucking against Sirius’s restraining arm.  “God, suck me already.” 

Sirius wraps a thumb and finger around him and slowly, much too slowly, slides the foreskin back and tongues the slit, licking Remus’s wetness around the exposed and trembling head. Still pressing Remus’s hips down into the sofa, Sirius plies only the tip of his tongue down the shaft, breathing on the fine brown curls at the base and then teasing up again. Remus is moaning and trying to buck as Sirius tongues and flicks until Remus is yowling _Fuck you, you cocktease_ and only then does Sirius take the head of his cock between his lips and let Remus’s hips go. 

Remus thrusts up into him, groaning and cradling Sirius’s head. Sirius lets him, humming around him, then gagging a little, then opening to it, letting his mouth be used as Remus fucks into him, hips shaking. The feel of Sirius’s hot mouth sends spirals of pleasure up through Remus’s body, coiling tighter and tighter inside him. Then his hands tighten, his balls tighten, but just as he is on the verge of orgasm, Sirius pulls off. 

He raises himself up, away, no part of their bodies touching. The loss of contact hits Remus like a punch in the stomach. Flushed and gasping, he grabs at Sirius’s shoulders in hurt frustration, arching his hips up, desperate to feel that mouth again. 

“No, Moony. You can’t come yet. You’re not ready.” 

“Sirius—” 

“This is about magic now. For you.” He runs his hands down Remus’s thighs. “I’m going to fuck your arse now, Moony, will you let me? Just like this. On your back, so I can see your face.” 

But Remus’s face is coming apart, shaking and trembling, his mouth biting itself, his breath ragged and hard. The wolf is throwing himself against the steel bars of his cage and the boy (small boy, terrified boy) is climbing rung over rung, his hands slick with sweat, hands slipping on the metal scaffolding as he climbs higher, higher, and Professor Lupin is somewhere far above them, lying on a platform at the top with a tiny paintbrush in his hand, paying attention to nothing but his task which right now involves painting the flicker of a single star, shining high on the domed ceiling— 

“Just like you fucked me, Moony. I’ll do it to you, and we’ll feel it together. I’ll be with you in it. Please.” 

Remus tries to speak and fails; he is nearly in tears. It’s what he wants, he knows that, but it is more than he can handle, and he knows that too. 

“Moony, Moony, I’m here. Give me your hand. What do you need?” 

“I can’t do it, I’m sorry, I—" 

“ _I’ll_ do it. If you’ll let me.” 

“I—I—I— _yes_.” 

“Tell me what you need.” 

“I’m afraid, I—talk to me, keep talking, say everything.” 

Sirius squeezes Remus’s hand. 

“Put your legs around me,” he says, low and soothing. “Like that. Hold on with your legs. Now I’m touching your face. You’re—ahh fuck—sucking my fingers, and it makes me so hard for you.... Now I’m stroking your balls the way you like. I remember what you like, Moony, my hands remember, just squeezing a little, then so lightly, like this, and then like _this_ —yes, moan for me, Moony, I’m watching your face and you’re so perfect.... Now I’m slicking you up, and you’re spreading your legs for me, your beautiful arse slicked up just for me, and I’m holding my cock and I’m so hard for you, I’m—” 

Sirius breaks off, looking wildly over his shoulder. Remus feels the connection break, feels himself whirling away into a nothingness that is too much; he is alone and a film of panic rises through him as everything clenches, his shoulders hunching in, there is nothing to hold onto— 

But then Sirius is there again, both hands gripping his thighs, hard—and then more gently. 

“I’m here, Moony. I’m sorry. I got spooked for a second. I’m all right now. We’re here, together, and I’m—right here. I’m holding my cock against your arse, and it’s so sweet for me.” 

Remus feels himself fall into pace again, his breath deepening, his body answering. Sirius’s cock is right against the pucker of his hole. Sirius is still for a moment and then slowly, he begins stroking Remus there. Stroking and caressing and _kissing_ Remus’s most sensitive skin with the tip of his cock. The barest touch of their two bodies together, but the energy it sends radiating through Remus is strong enough to change him into itself so he becomes that place, that secret closed place touched into the urge to open. He wants it. He can, he will. Remus slides his hands down and cups his arse cheeks. Shaking, he spreads himself. 

“Just like that for me. Pressing my cock inside you.” Sirius’s voice is rough and gentle all at once, blurred with wanting, and Remus feels himself shimmering over, the lines of his body wavering out from their edges and somehow into Sirius as Sirius breaches him, riding in on a sharp intake of breath whose exhale begins from the cock inside him and expands up through his belly, filling not just his lungs but his limbs, his ribcage, his head, everywhere. 

Sirius gives an enormous shudder, trembling so hard that for a moment Remus thinks he’s coming. But no. Sirius’s eyes stay open, shining down on Remus. The shudder passes and Sirius drops onto his elbows, bringing his mouth close to Remus’s ear. 

“I’m really here,” he murmurs. “I was in Azkaban and now I’m here. Sometimes in my cell I’d try and wank pretending it was you on my cock. But when I started to feel good they’d sense it and suck it out of me again—” 

“Oh, Sirius—” 

“But now I’m _here_.” He kisses Remus’s cheek, his eyes, his forehead, his lips, and as he does it his cock moves just a little inside Remus, stroking inside him and then being still again. “I’m _here_ —with you, Moony. In this lifetime, I get to be with you again. Loving you and fucking you and—” Sirius is crying now, tears splashing across Remus’s face—“lucky me, Remus. Lucky lucky me.” 

Remus feels himself begin to shake again, but this time with the fullness of it. A fullness that is everything he wanted and yet heartbreak. But so gently breaking, so good inside him, swelling into every place he hurts. He squeezes his calves against Sirius’s back, pulling himself forward so that Sirius is all the way inside him, kissing him as he does it, and then Sirius begins fucking. He raises himself up and begins to thrust. So slowly, his eyes on Remus. Eyes and cock pushing in, then easing back, then probing deeper. With each thrust Remus feels himself give way a little. And then give way a little more as he lets Sirius inside him, to look and touch and move. 

“Stroke yourself now,” Sirius croons. “Just as slow as I’m fucking you. Just like that. We have to go slow so we can...catch this.’’ He is concentrating, his body seeking something Remus cannot yet sense, his eyes burning into Remus, and his cock so beautifully burning, heating him up—and then Sirius gasps, and blinks, and a shudder passes through him, and passes through Remus too, and Remus recognizes it. Sirius’s magic, as unmistakable as his scent. 

“Can you feel it?” Sirius asks. His voice vibrates low in Remus’s belly 

“Padfoot— _yes_. Oh fuck, oh fuck, Sirius, you’re here, please fuck me, _stay_ —” 

“Like when we were kids, yeah? And we found it together.” Sirius’s forehead wrinkles in concentration, hips pumping harder now. Remus tightens his grip on himself, strokes himself longer and sweeter and _fuck_ , they are passing their magic back and forth between them, nothing ever but this. 

“You and me, Remus. Nobody taught us but we called it out of each other. And it made our real selves grow, and we fed each other with it until we grew strong enough to be our real forms, and hold our real forms, and fuck, and love, and _be_ —that’s what we we did. That’s what I’m giving back to you now.” 

“Kiss me—” 

“Give me your tongue—” 

“Uhh—” 

Sirius sucks Remus’s tongue in like a cock, drawing in his cheeks, humming down its wet length as he fucks. Remus’s tongue begins to buzz. The vibration moves down through him: tongue to throat to heart to belly to his trembling arsehole. Then to Sirius’s cock so deep inside him, and then up through Sirius again, the vibration circling through their two bodies, cock to belly to heart to mouth again, around and around in a circle. 

Sirius speeds up, his hair sweeping Remus’s face as he fucks him. The circle speeds up, and Remus feels himself pulled in then, whirled into the circle. His body taken up, energy vibrating deep in his balls and belly until he’s glowing with it. And then the glowing is taken up. His feelings taken up and whirled until _he_ is the circle, the two of them a circle that shimmers and hums and flows. Remus is moaning and the moans too are the circle. His heartbeat and his breath and his sounds are no longer his; all of it belongs to the circle.   

His skin is in it. His boy skin, unbitten and unscarred. Smooth and perfect, light golden hairs of smallness all over him. So delicate everywhere that the circle is weeping with it. And his wolf body is in it. The weight and power of it, the magic of it, the wolf-musk-oil-fur smell, teeth and breath and need so thick that the circle is growling and spitting with it. And his scars are blooming in it. White lines knitting their light across the circle, across his long adult limbs, beneath the dark gold and pale silver thicket of hair on the chest and limbs of the man. The scars lighting a map across the circle, connecting all of it, showing him not where he is but who. He is the circle. Boy and wolf and man all in the circle as Sirius moans and hums and fucks and flows it into Remus, deep in the magic he is making. 

_This way, Moony. I love you, and Padfoot loves you, and you have to let us in again, you can’t keep parts of you in prison_

Sirius sucking him, fucking him, casting magic in him but there is no _him_ , no separation, because he can hear Sirius’s voice in his own head that is not his, he is the circle, and in the circle is the voice:

_You can’t be your own dementor anymore, you have to break out, let me love all of you_

Sirius

gathering all of Remus

_oh mine_

up

_Now, Moony, NOW, come with me, say my name_

“Padfoot—SIRIUS—”

everything flowing in, every broken piece of him

_And say I’m yours, for ALL of you_

“Sirius, mine, you’re mine—”

pulled into the circle again

_and I’m your dog_

“Everything, Padfoot, mine always, oh God—”

Remus is sobbing, the edges of his vision are blacking out, his eyes are open or closed he can’t tell, and he can’t breathe his own breath because Sirius is fucking it out of him, coming into him, and Remus can’t breathe or see but Sirius _has_ him. All of him. In the circle of this place not dependent on sight or sound or breath. Or life even.

“Sirius,” he sobs, “Sirius.” Over and over because there is no other word.

The moon slips down the window and the darkness in the room lessens. When the kerosene lamp goes out, neither of them notices. The candle flame grows tall and smoky on a long wick. Gray light leaks into the corners of the room. Somewhere in the world outside the cottage, a bird calls. In the waning shadows of the night, semen and tears and sweat and thirteen years of anguish are all small human things. The room is small and human, and the bodies in it. Two bodies wholly naked, wholly touching. 

They are rich, all of a sudden. For these few minutes they have everything.

Remus shifts his limbs, holds Sirius against his chest. Whose chest. His: a rushing in his blood, a settling along his cracked and mended bones. Spirits not yet sure they’re welcome. Inside him. Or someone. Here. 

No need to speak it. The words aren’t there anyway. Just the vibration. 

And the scent; even his human nose can smell it. Filling him with himself. So strange. Remus inhales deeply through his nose, tasting.

“Imagine,” Sirius murmurs against his ear, “what we could do with the next thirteen years.”

The words fill Remus with more sensations he cannot name. He lets them wash over him and his whole body tingles, like the light brush of Sirius’s thighs against his own. This wordless magic. Wandless magic.

_Oh_. But what about—

Remus doesn’t deliberate. “Sirius.” 

“Mmmm.” 

“When—when you do leave, you’ll take my wand.”

Sirius blinks. Remus feels the eyelashes flutter against his jaw.

“Oh, Moony. No. It’s yours; I can’t.”

Remus feels oddly clear-headed. It’s obvious what must be done now, he can see it. Using language to explain it seems clumsy, that’s all. But if he has to, then he will. He raises himself up on one elbow on the daybed.

“First point.” He pauses, feeling all the words come rushing back into his head. He clears his throat and continues. “There are dementors after you who, if they catch you, will—” Remus trails off. So very many words Professor Lupin speaks. But he must speak them. “Second point. You’re on the run from the Ministry, and if _they_ catch you, they will hand you straight over to the aforementioned dementors. And Third point: Given that the probability is criminally low that, at the moment you’re attacked, you’ll have my arse handy to wandlessly shag yourself to safety on the astral _plane_ , you’ll need some other form of defense. Ergo: you need a wand that will work for you. This one.”

“But it’s yours.”

“I believe that’s the conclusion to which my argument was building.” Remus flicks his finger gently against Sirius’s jaw. “You’ll take _my_ wand. Especially now.”

“But you need—”

“I’ll get another. Just till you give it back. I know this is right, and I’ve already done it; I’ve just told my wand to go with you, so it’s not up to you, Padfoot. To go with you and be yours for—for as long as you need it, and then you’ll bring it back when…when you come back soon, okay?”

He has gone from sounding like Professor Lupin winding it up to sounding like a boy on the verge of tears. This boy.

But then Sirius wraps his thin arms around the boy and breathes warm breath in his hair.

“Right, then. I’ll take it, sweet Moony. And I’ll bring it back.” 

Remus summons his wand from the tangle of trousers, the only wand he’s ever had. The thought of Sirius having his wand is deeply comforting. It will be as if part of Remus himself is with him, protecting him. Sirius takes the wand and weighs it in his hand a moment. Then he points it at the candle on the stool and whispers something. The flame of the candle gutters, then rises up, and a piece of the fire detaches itself from the burning wick. It floats into the air above their heads. Sirius flicks the wand in a series of little circles, and the freed flame splits into words:  

_I promise._

The burning letters flicker for a moment, then vanish in long wisps of smoke.

“You always were good at those,” says Remus, and lays his head on Sirius’s hard breastbone. He can hear his heart beating through the thin wall of his chest. And if he listens—listens not just with his ear but with his belly, his genitals, his chest—he can still hear the circle’s hum.

Sirius rolls Remus onto his side and spoons himself against him. With his chest against Remus’s back, with his cock soft against Remus’s arse cheeks, with his nose buried in Remus’s shoulder, they hold each other as the room lightens, their magic shifting in and out of places inside them, filling and calling in, and the waning night indifferent to how much more than this meager interval is needed.

It ends with a tapping at the window. Both of them rouse instantly, Remus reaching for a wand that isn’t there, Sirius already on his feet in the middle of the room, the wand in his hand now.

It’s a barn owl, clicking its beak against the glass. The message on its leg addressed not to Remus but to Sirius. Sirius opens it.

A single word, in the spidery hand of Albus Dumbledore. 

_Go._

Sirius pulls on the trousers that are too long for him, shoves his feet into Dumbledore’s boots. He throws his arms around Remus and kisses him fast on the mouth and then, too quickly, he turns out of the kiss and into the spell. 

The wand works. Sirius Disapparates. 

The room spins, compresses. 

Remus is eleven. He is alone on the floor of the Shrieking Shack, naked and bleeding. He has ripped his own chest open and the muscles in his arms and legs are torn. He is alone and there is no refuge from pain that won’t stop, pain splintering through his human self until he is no longer Remus; he is just pain. He lifts his head and tries to get his bearings. The moon is gone, the sun is rising. He is alone in his cottage, he is on the floor in front of the daybed. The note from Dumbledore lies crumpled beneath the opened window. And the white-hot splinters of pain do not stop because his body has exploded, each shattered cell flying apart in an effort to fill the vacuum created by Sirius Black leaving him again. 

Every feeling Remus thought he’d banished. Every trace of love and desire and hurt that Sirius etched into him. Every healed scar, every fresh wound, all of them fucking opened. All of him _fucked_ open, torn through, torn into and the pain is pelting him like rain, like dreams, like transformation, and this is why he hid, this is why he died, but he’s alive again now and he can’t stop it—everything is broken open. The circle is ripped open, in full bleed: 

_pain of transformation, pain of the wolf, pain of the boy, pain of the body that tries and fails to hold them..._

_smell of the map, ink and parchment at midnight, smell of smoke..._

_the four of them running through the forest in the moonlight, damp leaves and animals, smell of his friends..._

_taste of Sirius’s mouth, sixteen years old, cigarettes and jam on his tongue..._

_old jazz records; feel and sound of feet dancing, hands at the back of his neck, sweat-damp..._

_the wolf ripping into a rabbit in the forest, Padfoot yipping approval and licking the wolf’s bloody snout..._

_the first “I love you” by the common room fire..._

_hunger for flesh..._

_and the guilt of it mixing like blood and saliva in his mouth..._

_backed against a shelf in the restricted section of the library, shelves jabbing his spine, finding his voice at last: “Sirius, look at me while you touch my balls...”_

_the fear and love and trust and magic pouring through..._

_sound of the motorcycle’s engine revving him into panic and then the smell and clutch of leather and the soaring happiness of holding him in all that wind..._

_taste of firewhisky drunk alone in the old flat after a fight..._

_wilting carnations sharp clove smell autumn night rage betrayal and grief and Lily’s green eyes looking up at him out of James’s face that is Harry’s face and every stone in the castle reminding..._

_and the first time those three boys of long ago bent over Remus in the Shrieking Shack, a ring of worried angels looking down on him as he came to, bloody and shivering, and Sirius’s young hand finding his and holding it, their fingers twining together in the cold light…._

Remus stumbles outside, naked and scarcely aware of what he’s doing. Overhead the morning is gray blue and everything that could possibly be Remus is impossibly small beneath the sky. Just a handful of molecules, a scattered vast fragility that is his only platform from which to face each relentless hour that will sweep down over him and shove its unwrapped truth into his hands, again, again, again: his inability to hope correctly yet being called upon to hope. 

For Sirius’s return. For thirteen new years to heal the lost ones. For the healing of his body and his heart and his spirit, for the mending of the shattered. For the magic that must do it.

And for learning to live into the truth of who he is—who he has never stopped being, amidst the lost and broken fragments—the truth of his vulnerability, his hunger, his love. The horrifying truth of its persistence. It is like coming face to face with a god: transcendent and terrible and impossible to look away from, and he is blinded by his looking. 

Remus lies down. The groundcover is damp and cold against his bare skin, and the hairs on his body rise to a shiver. The wind blows over him, over the lichens and moss, through the low grasses. Remus opens his mouth and spreads his arms and legs out over the earth and lets the wind blow into him--his mouth, his nose, his eyes. He lets it blow everywhere inside him, sweep over everything. He lets it, and waits to see how it will leave him. To see if it will leave him with a clean and hollow space. A place where he can stretch out, then curl himself around himself and sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are love!


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